A few days after the storm was over Madeira was made; to the eastward of it, as the frigate sailed on, there came in sight a small island called the Desertas. Tom, wishing to show that he was wide awake, reported a large ship coming round the Desertas. He was, however, only laughed at, for his supposed ship turned out to be a rock of a needle form, rising several hundred feet out of the sea, and would have been as Higson told him, if it had been a ship, bigger than the famed _Mary Dunn_, of Diver, whose flying jibboom swept the weathercock off Calais church steeple, while her spanker-boom end only just shaved clear of the white cliffs of old England. The scenery of Madeira, as they sailed along its shore, was pronounced very grand and beautiful; its lofty cliffs rising perpendicularly out of the blue ocean with a fringe of surf at their base, and vine-clad mountains towering up into the clear sky beyond them; here and there a small bay appearing, forming the mouth of a ravine, its sides covered with orange groves and dotted with whitewashed cottages, and a little church in their midst. Rounding the southern end of the island, the frigate came to an anchor in the bay of Funchal, the town in a thin line of houses stretching along the shore before them, and a wild mountainous region beyond, with country houses or quintas scattered over the lower ground, and high above it the white church of Nossa Senhora do Monte, glistening in the sun. An important object had attracted Captain Hemming to Madeira. It was to ship a couple of casks of its famed wine for the admiral on the Jamaica station, as well as one for himself, and he took the opportunity of fitting a new topgallant-mast. A few hours afterwards the _Tudor_ came in and dropped her anchor close to the frigate. She had evidently suffered severely in the gale. Her fore-topsail-yard was so badly sprung that sail could not be carried on it. Her mizen-topmast was gone, her starboard bulwarks forward stove in, one of her boats carried away; besides which she had received other damages. The sea which had injured her bulwarks had swept along her deck, but everything had been secured, without doing further harm, and fortunately no one had been lost.